Posted
by
timothy
on Monday November 07, 2011 @04:08AM
from the no-1984-runners-allowed dept.

A few weeks ago, Robert X. Cringely revealed that a long-lost, hour-long interview he conducted of Steve Jobs in 1995 had been found. Now, it seems the lost tape has found its calling: the movies. Says the linked Economic Times story: "The interview will be shown at Landmark theaters in 19 cities around the country beginning Nov 16."

Yes, especially since there is no news about him anymore since he died. Even when he was alive we already knew he was a righteous asshole with a vision for shiny and user-friendly things who had great success in transforming the music- and mobile phone industry. I didn't buy the book because I thought the juicy details would be public in no time, and I was right. I don't need to see any documentary or read any book about SJ ever again. Everything is out in the open already.

I think this is selling him short a bit. His contribution was entirely in what to sell, his insight was about why the products should be designed in a certain way. Yes, Apple got ideas from Xerox about basics of the GUI, but Xerox did not manage to fully realize the potential of the technology they had. Xerox's products were a flop, because they didn't understand what was it about them that could make them good, and thus never took advantage of their own innovation. It's no good if you have figured out something cool if you have no clue how to actually use it in a product.

Never mind that Apple pretty much reimplemented all of Xerox's ideas from scratch. It's not like they went to Xerox, ripped some code, then tweaked it and sold it on. The original Mac and Apple II were quite revolutionary products. There was nothing quite like them on the market. Of course there were other "similar" products, but nothing that was designed with similar attention to detail and usability. Even "silly" stuff like Apple II's switching power supply was quite a breakthrough in an age where most computers had a transfomer, rectifier, and a linear regulator that ran pretty hot.

Of course both Tek and HP sold oscilloscopes with such power supplies at the time, and probably some workstations and mainframes had switching supplies, but no consumer/hobbyist products at the time had that. Look, for example, at ABC-80 [wikipedia.org], circa 1978. See the black radiator in the back? That's what the linear regulators were bolted to. It added to the cost and made for an unwieldy-looking thing. Perhaps in Swedish climate it made sense, though:)

All those "little" things count, and that's why "quite like it" doesn't count.